Adelaide Clemens Quotes

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

I stuck out like a sore thumb when I came on, just by the fact that I looked so different. I think that adjustment for the audience was a hurdle for me.

Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

Afraid no, I wasn't afraid but it was an unusual thing, it was an unusual feeling. It was an unusual atmosphere for me having grown up in this country and, and, and never seeing anything like that.

I describe my years in Los Angeles as 12 years of culture shock.

I can never be anonymous - especially when I walk round looking like this; especially when I take so much trouble not to be anonymous, right?

Being a big black man in China in the mainland, walking down the street, you have everyone looking at you, 'Basketball?' They don't really see a lot of us around, maybe on TV, so they're just looking.

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.

I realized I'm a very, very white dancer.

My mom is from Ghana, and my dad is from the States, so even in my family when I was growing up, my mom said I was the American one, and my dad said I was the weird African one.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.

I have to be ahead of myself so I don't just fit into the realm of everybody who sounds like me.

If you can't find what's unique, people aren't going to listen.

Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."

When I came to England it wasn't what it is now, then the black people were very rarely strong. I had a personal shock because England wasn't what I expected it to be... where people lived like Jane Austen.

Back home I had always been comfortable around people. I was the troublemaker, always being funny - that's just who I am. I'm Latina; I've always had that extra little flavor. But when I got to New York, it became about being comfortable with myself in a place where I didn't know many people, and that was the big challenge. Ultimately my personality helped me build relationships with the people I was working with, and I was able to stand out.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, BUT they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.

My mother and my father were illiterate immigrants from Russia. When I was a child they were constantly amazed that I could go to a building and take a book on any subject. They couldn't believe this access to knowledge we have here in America. They couldn't believe that it was free.

I know that I am very much like everybody else, but not really.

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America